Editors, not creators

Hampton is a private membership community for vetted founders and CEOs. Think YPO for internet-era founders: 1,000+ members across 16 cities, organized into in-person core groups of 8 that meet monthly.

Co-founder Joe Speiser runs operations, finance, and systems. Before Viktor, the team's small tech function was doing all of it. Pulling reports out of HubSpot and Domo. Searching Notion by hand for operational docs. Managing a backlog of one-off data requests from across the company. There was no system at all for one of the workflows that would become the most-used: personalized member introductions.

Speiser installed Viktor on April 12. Within 44 days, 18 staff members had accounts. The CEO alone generated 887 conversation threads, roughly 20 per day.

Every new Hampton member posts an introduction in Slack. Speiser's daily routine: he DMs Viktor run intros skill [Name] and Viktor researches the member, pulling their HubSpot record, company website, and LinkedIn, then cross-referencing 1,000+ existing members to find 3 high-signal matches by city, industry, stage, and interests. It posts the introductions directly in the member's thread.

When asked which workflow he'd keep if he had to give back every other one:

This workflow didn't replace a person or a tool. It didn't exist before.

The CEO-to-Viktor DM channel isn't a prompt box. It's a working relationship. Two examples from May.

The 887 threads are one channel. Viktor also runs 26 automated cron jobs for the broader team. Daily digests for the VP of Chapters. Renewal trackers for billing. Curriculum feedback rollups for the programming team. Post-event attendee reports. A RevOps daily digest. A weekly podcast-to-blog pipeline that transcribes episodes and creates HubSpot drafts automatically.

It also built 12 custom web dashboards pulling live data from HubSpot, Stripe, Airtable, Cometly, and Google Ads, including an executive dashboard both co-founders check daily.

What's notable isn't the volume. It's how the team has reorganized around it. Hampton's VP of Core again:

The tech team itself is being rebuilt around the same idea.

Joe Speiser doesn't talk about Viktor in terms of time saved. He talks about it in terms of leverage. Hampton runs on 25 people. With Viktor sitting inside HubSpot, Stripe, Airtable, Notion, and Slack at the same time, those 25 are doing the work of a much larger team.

Three roles that were on the hiring plan when Speiser installed Viktor are no longer on the calendar. The senior data engineer ($200K budgeted). The junior ops manager ($120K). The partial product and PM coverage ($120K). Total: $440K in budgeted compensation that Hampton hasn't added to payroll.

The interesting part isn't that Viktor replaced three people. It's that the leverage made the original org plan look conservative. Hampton's 25-person team is shipping like a 50-person team, and Speiser is using that headroom to hire differently. Less data engineering, more program design.

Speiser tried.

The point isn't model quality. It's that ChatGPT projects don't sit inside HubSpot, Stripe, Notion, Airtable, Slack and Teams, and Meta Ads at the same time, with permissions a CEO can defend.

Data accuracy has required vigilance. Ad spend numbers didn't match between sources. A pacing formula produced wrong projections. A retention report included members who didn't attend. The HubSpot sync still needs babysitting. Each time, Speiser caught the error. Viktor builds fast but doesn't always verify its own output.

This is the honest tradeoff of a fast-moving tool inside a real business. Hampton accepts it because the alternative isn't a slower, more careful Viktor. The alternative is going back to the Notion scavenger hunt.

When asked what he'd tell another founder community considering the tool:

And what he's planning next:

Hampton has been using Viktor for 44 days. 24 integrations. 26 automated workflows. 12 custom dashboards. 18 staff accounts. 887 CEO conversations. The intros didn't exist before. The dashboards replaced Domo. The operational docs stopped being a scavenger hunt.

It's a work in progress. It's already the busiest coworker on the team.